Taking a statin to help reduce your cholesterol? Eating bergamot, the citrus fruit, or supplement seems to ‘super-charge’ the drug, and may even mean you can reduce the dose, a new study has discovered.
Combing a statin with the supplement BergaMet, derived from the citrus fruit, seems to be the best way to keep cholesterol levels in check, say researchers from the University Magna Graecia in Catanzaro, Italy.
They tested different approaches on 77 pateints with high cholesterol: some were given a placebo, others took the statin Rosuvastatin, some took only BergaMet and the rest took 10mg Rosuvastatin and 1,000mg BergaMet daily for 30 days. At the end of the trial, those taking the statin and supplement had far lower levels of the LDL, or ‘bad’, cholesterol compared to any of the other groups.
The results are significant because up to 40 per cent of people taking a statin suffer a side effect that often results in them stopping the medication. One study also found that 1 in 25 patients taking simvastatin, one of the world’s most commonly prescribed statins, are still taking the 80mg dose, even though it has effectively been banned because of the high rate of side effects, including nausea, sickness, dizziness and muscle aches.
(Source: International Journal of Cardiology, 2013; 170: 140-5)
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